I have found numerous articles stating that Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) cannot be used with with Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) on Server 2012 r2.

I had set it up before on my Server 2008r2 CSV, but it doesn't seem to work on my CSV on Server 2012 r2, so I am quite suprised that it doesnt work in 2012 r2.

When I attempt to set it up from the replicated end, I get the following message: HyperVCSV.local: it is not possible to enumerate the physical disk drives in the cluster resource group. The cluster group could not be found.

When I attempt to set it up from the clustered end, I get the following message: Error, Value does not fall within expected range.

6 Replies

I don't even understand the use case. DFS-R is for replicating closed files. CSV is for storing VHDX and related files which are normally always open. Those are fundamentally incompatible.
If it worked at all in 2008 R2 it sounds like Microsoft didn't put a block in. In 2012 R2 it sounds like they're preventing you from doing something stupid.
If you want to replicate VMs, use Hyper-V Replica.

Use Case: I have users at a remote site that need access to the files at the main site (CSV site). DFSR is being used to REPLICATE a copy of the files to the remote users location so they don't have to constantly reach back to the CSV site.. It has nothing to replicating Hyper-Vs, only replicating folders from a CSV. If all you can do is flame, please do not reply.

Are the files on CSV? Your files should be on a Windows file servers that use DFS-R to replicate among the file servers. CSV has nothing to do with this. CSV is for Hyper-V failover clustering only. It is not to be used for general purpose file sharing.

You can use DFS-R on a Windows file server VM, and the VM can itself be on a Hyper-V cluster that uses CSV. I do this all day long, but that's not the same things as DFS-R on CSV.

A file server cluster does not use CSV. CSV is strictly for Hyper-V clusters. File server clustering uses the same active/passive clustering technology that Microsoft acquired and introduced in Windows NT 4.0 Advanced IIRC. The storage in the cluster is exclusively owned by the active node in the cluster.

Maybe we should start at the beginning. Are your file servers VMs? (They should be. Much easier).

Which hypervisor?

How are you attaching the shared storage to the file server nodes? iSCSI is easy. FC should be pretty easy as well, but I have never used it. If you are attaching through a hypervisor there are specific requirements to doing that, and it depends on the hypervisor. There may also be limitations, such as unable to online grow a shared VHDX file under Hyper-V 2012 R2 (limitation removed under Hyper-V 2016).

I have found numerous articles stating that Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) cannot be used with with Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) on Server 2012 r2.

I had set it up before on my Server 2008r2 CSV, but it doesn't seem to work on my CSV on Server 2012 r2, so I am quite suprised that it doesnt work in 2012 r2.

When I attempt to set it up from the replicated end, I get the following message: HyperVCSV.local: it is not possible to enumerate the physical disk drives in the cluster resource group. The cluster group could not be found.

When I attempt to set it up from the clustered end, I get the following message: Error, Value does not fall within expected range.

Has anyone found a work around for this?

You can't use DFS-R with Hyper-V: VHD(x) files with VM images are never closed.

You might want to use PeerLock or similar lock arbiters (MetaSAN?) but it's a bad idea from the performance point of view + Microsoft won't support this scenario ever ;(

You need somebody sitting one level below and doing synchronous replication between nodes: Storage Replica (Server-to-Server), StarWind (we even have a free version for that) and Storage Spaces Direct (if you're lucky to run Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition on all the nodes).